Harry Allen Smith was born 19 December 1907 in McLeansboro, Illinois, the son of Henry Arthur Smith and the former Adeline Mae Allen. He was the third of nine children. Adeline had planned to name him Henry Allen, but his grandmother had the documents made out in her preferred way: Harry Arthur Smith, Jr. His parents knew nothing of the shenanigans, and called him by the name they thought was his; only later was the subterfuge revealed, and the young Smith opted for Harry Allen—H. Allen as it was later stylized—though he became unsure, thinking it a bit “faggoty.”
His father, at least according to the 1910 census, was in retail bricks, which would seem to mean he sold bricks. He worked on his own accord. The family moved through Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana, during his childhood yearsThe family was in Defiance, Indiana, by 1920, where the elder Harry worked as a cigar maker. Around this time, the younger Harry dropped out of high school, eventually finding himself working as a journalist, beginning, it seems, with a job at the Huntington Press in 1922.
Over the next decade, Smith moved frequently, rural journalist job to rural journalist job: Jeffersonville, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Sebring, Florida. He was sometimes editor, sometimes even part owner of the places he worked. In Sebring, he met the society editor Nelle Mae Simpson, and they became engaged. He did bummed around, from job o job, and even spent time compiling city directories, before moving out to Tulsa, Oklahoma, were he and Nelle wed. They had two children. After a short stay there, he and Nelle moved to Denver, where he followed in the footsteps of Gene Fowler.
His father, at least according to the 1910 census, was in retail bricks, which would seem to mean he sold bricks. He worked on his own accord. The family moved through Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana, during his childhood yearsThe family was in Defiance, Indiana, by 1920, where the elder Harry worked as a cigar maker. Around this time, the younger Harry dropped out of high school, eventually finding himself working as a journalist, beginning, it seems, with a job at the Huntington Press in 1922.
Over the next decade, Smith moved frequently, rural journalist job to rural journalist job: Jeffersonville, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Sebring, Florida. He was sometimes editor, sometimes even part owner of the places he worked. In Sebring, he met the society editor Nelle Mae Simpson, and they became engaged. He did bummed around, from job o job, and even spent time compiling city directories, before moving out to Tulsa, Oklahoma, were he and Nelle wed. They had two children. After a short stay there, he and Nelle moved to Denver, where he followed in the footsteps of Gene Fowler.
By accounts, Smith was a small man. Humorist Fred Allen said he weighed “110 pounds with his bridgework in and the complete works of Dale Carnegie under his arm.” He himself said he’d inherited his father’s double-ended nose. Early in his life, growing up in what he thought of later as a stultifying Victorian culture, Smith had been enraptured by religion, even attending both Catholic and Protestant services. (His family was Catholic.) His father, though, was something of a non-conformist and what he called an unaffiliated socialist, and soon enough Smith sloughed off what he saw as small-town superstitions. He came to see the region where he grew up as narrow-minded, even stupid.
Smith came to adopt this trait, along with others from his father. He wrote in his autobiography, “The thought occurs to me that maybe I have another important heritage from my father, in addition to impatience and a double-ended nose. I hold myself to be among the fortunate few of the world who have not a single superstition.” He was a thoroughly modern man: H. L. Mencken, he of the debunking school and supercilious disdain for backwoods Christians, was a hero. Smith also shared his father’s befuddlement at the world, taste for alcohol and cussing. In Smith, these emerged as a fondness for practical jokes and bawdy humor. His “left nut,” he told H. L. Mencken, was the “one that is withered from constant grasping.”
Around 1929, Smith became a rewrite man for the United Press, and the family moved to New York. The 1930 census has them all renting a place in Queens. It had been a full few years, but Smith was young, only 23. His work with the United Press allowed him a chance to experiment and expand with this form of journalism, as he not just re-wrote other pieces but also put out article under his own name. Later in the 1930s he moved to the New York World-Telegram, where he continued developing his style. He was also shopping books and trying to break into the New Yorker, though he failed in the latter and it would be a while yet before he succeeded in the former.
At this point in his life, Smith was “book crazy,” catching up on the education he’d missed by dropping out of high school and forgoing college. He was a literary critic, reviewing books and interviewing authors. He also did stories on oddballs: a bow-tie inventor, radio quiz winners, the worlds smallest midget, and strippers. Several strippers. (Another famous quip, upon visiting a nudist camp and meeting a woman there: “She was barefoot up to her chin.”) Some characterized him as a humorist, but Smith was leery of the designation: “I’m NOT a humorist,” he reportedly said. “I’m a reporter, a reporter with a humorous slant. I am funny only in the sense that the world is funny.” But then he amended this declaration, after he’d heard a definition of humorist as someone who thought he was either better nor worse than the mass of humanity: “I am a humorist,” he wrote in the last line of his autobiography.
Later, he would explain, “There is a mistaken notion that I spend the major portion of my time searching out screwballs, that I am forever on the prowl for nuts. It is true that I search for some of them, but I would like to make note of the fact that such questing is not altogether necessary. I am constantly running into strange people, whether I like it or not. One of my friends suggests that it is Destiny, that bizarre personalities gravitate to me. I am inclined toward another theory. I believe that I am forever bumping into sacks because God made so many of ‘em.”
The persona that he crafted in his writing was a combination of plain-speaking, slightly naive—but unflustered and commonsensical—rural writer and Mencken-esque debunker. He was, in the view of an obituary write, “coolly skeptical”—though that coolly seems not quite right. Smith valorized Mencken, so much that he was too afraid to approach him in public, but did write to ask for an autograph. Smith, as far as I know, was never formally associated with any skeptical movement, but continued a particular tradition of skepticism, running through Josh Billings, Finley Peter Dunne, and Twain: of the Missouri “Show-Me” type. But whether or not he was associated with organized skepticism, he was part of the nexus, influenced by Mencken and, in turn, being favored by Bergen Evans.
Smith’s fortunes increased in the late 1930s. He wrote a commissioned biography of the industrialist Robert Gair, and a spoof of Hitler, “Mr Klein’s Kampf,” which seemed to suffer with the onset of actual war. Subsequently, though, he was approached by publishers interested in putting out something by him. He ended up with Doubleday, and in 1941 put out “Low Man on the Totem Pole,” a loose collection of essays, some previously published. It was a success—and is the probable source for the common phrase “low man on a totem pole.” The book sold 24,000 copies by November 1941, and almost a million-and-a-half by 1946. Mencken opted not to review it—as Smith had asked him to do—but praised it in a letter to him.
Based on this success, Smith left routine newspaper work and fashioned himself a writer. He did have a column for a little while starting in October 1941, but was unsatisfied with it and cut the contract short. Otherwise, he went on to put out numerous books—more than forty in all, essay collections; a novel (and sequels) about a cat that inherits a baseball team, which inspired a movie; baseball books; joke books; a fantasy novel; an autobiographical pastiche—and he wrote for a variety of magazines, from Coronet to Playboy.
In 1955, Evans edited a collection of Smith’s works, “The World, The Flesh, and H. Allen Smith.” He appeared on television occasionally. The Smiths lived in Mount Kisco, New York, until they moved to Texas in 1967, and he took an interest in making chili (which became the subject of another book). In the mid-1970s, he was working on a biography of Gene Fowler. The book would not come out until 1977, though; for while he was on the tour, Smith passed.
Harry Allen Smith died in his sleep on 24 February 1976. He was 68.
****************
Harry Allen Smith was ensconced in the small, modern literary clique of New York that valorized Fort—a group that overlapped with another contingent of modernist writers, chief among them H. L. Mencken, who did not. So it is no surprise that he came to hear of Fort and the Fortean Society, at the very moment of its founding.
In New York, Smith showcased his lack of superstition. He made fun of health faddists and poked at Aimee Sample McPherson. He and Joseph Dunninger—a magician who was at least familiar with Charles Fort and, later, the Fortean Society—attended seances, which Smith thought of as complete bunk, the point being to expose the hoaxing. Later, he admitted that there was one group he dismissed that ended up being correct: early advocates of rockets. He thought of rocketeers as “screwballs, no more than a small cut abovee tea-leaf readers and Ouia (Weejee) board addicts and Imminent-End-of-the-World prophets.” But by the time his autobiography was published, in 1962, they’d had the last laugh.
Also in New York, Smith rubbed elbows with literary lights. He got to know Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and Benjamin De Casseres, who was a friend of Charles Fort. He met Burton Rascoe at a party, but Rascoe blew him off—prompting Smith to tell him that he was president of the “Burton Rascoe Literary Club of Tulsa”—Rascoe was from Oklahoma—but now he was sorry he’d ever taken such a position. Rascoe followed him around the party trying to ingratiate himself. Known by such company, and a book reviewer, it is no surprise that Smith attended the first (and only!) meeting of the Fortean Society, in January 1931.
He later wrote about it for “Low Man on the Totem Pole”: it was chosen for inclusion in his best-of by Bergen Evans; and a version of the story made it into his autobiography. As Smith told it, Fort was the cause of his no longer fetishizing authors; after he attended the meeting—which was really publicity for “Lo!”—and met the man himself, forming an opinion of him along the lines of Mencken’s and Evans’s, Smith had to re-evaluate just how smart he thought authors really were. He turned his attention, instead, to writing about athletes and celebrities and strippers (though he still did book reviews for some years). The story in “Low Man” constituted all of chapter five.
The chapter gave some biographical background on Fort, and his ideas, which Smith said were borrowed from John Jacob Astor II’s “A Journey to Other Worlds.” He then went on to describe some of Fort’s ideas, and attributed them to strongly held belief—Fort “called attention, for example, to the simultaneous disappearance of Ambrose Bierce in Mexico and Ambrose Small in Canada. Was someone perhaps collecting Ambroses? He suspected as much—which doesn’t seem exactly right, as it missed Fort’s puckish sense of humor. (Smith himself admitted this a few sentences later, making Fort not a screwball, but a nihilist: “He believed in nothing.”)
That Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, John Cowper Powys, Tiffany Thayer, and Alexander Woollcott should celebrate such a man gave Smith pause. And then there was to be a society, dedicated to preserving Fort’s data—which, as Smith later learned, were nothing more than newspaper clippings and penciled notes, written in a code, that Fort had squirreled about his apartment in old shoe boxes. This was the man, these were the beliefs, that Dreiser had blackmailed Horace Liveright into publishing? This was the man who was “a sort of hobby horse with certain literary groups? [I am not sure to whom Smith refers here.] This man, who Smith noted—believed the stars were just apertures in a gelatinous substance that surrounded the earth, this man whom the public (rightly, it would seem) ignored, this man who said huge fields of ice and acres of caterpillars floated in a Super-Sargasso Sea that floated above our heads, this man whom Thayer wanted ranked with Galileo and Pasteur, this man who inspired Thayer’s ravings—this man made a mockery of the literary profession:
“After I had looked into the matter of Charles Fort’s great genius, then contemplated with men who trumpeted that genius, I had a change of heart about book authors.”
Smith, though, did salvage his heroes. Ben Hecht, he said, only praised Fort because “The Book of the Damned” had given him a story idea that saw him through a dry patch. “I’ve always had an affection for old man Fort since that day, Otherwise, I don’t know what he’s driving at,” Hecht supposedly said—which doesn’t quite fit with his later actions. But that night, Smith said, he appeared only for cocktails, then went to meet Gene Fowler—another Smith hero—at the wrestling matches. Meanwhile, Mencken wrote Smith to protest any association of his name with the Fortean Society: “Your story describing the funeral of Charles Fort lists me as one of his customers. This was a libel of a virulence sufficient to shock humanity. As a matter of fact, I looked upon Fort as a quack of the most obvious sort and often said so in print. As a Christian I forgive the man who wrote the story and news editor who passed it. But both will suffer in hell.”
And, indeed, Smith does seem to have taken a pose dyspeptic view of literary culture as the thirties wore on, as well as declaring himself on the side of Mencken and Evans as a skeptic who supported science and opposed Fort and the Fortean Society—seeing Forteans not as skeptical themselves, but credulous. Shortly after the Fortean Society meeting, he went to meet Fort—the meeting was at the end of January, and he met Fort in the middle of February. He wrote up a piece about him and his Supercheckers for the UP wires. When he reviewed Fort’s “Wild Talents” in June 1932, he admitted the book was “fairly entertaining reading, but somehow” he didn’t “seem inclined to classify Fort much above Ripley.”
Two years later, Fort had become the set-up for a joke in Smith’s writing. Covering the debut of the Loch Ness Monster, spent the bulk of the article on Fort: the reports, he said, “provide small excitement for one familiar with the records compiled by the late Charles Fort, sworn foe of dogmatic science.
“By Fortean standards, the Scot monster is nothing but a vestigial remnant of a once great species. The beastie that has been making the simple Scottish folk run for dear life is only a sissy sea-serpent.
“Fort, in one of his books, took up the question of sea serpents at great length. He was inclined to believe the monsters exist, but he always was puzzled by the fact that they are seen, perhaps once and then do a neat job of disappearing.
“Fort, who was a devoted friend of Thoedore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, J. David Stern, Booth Tarkington and Edgar Lee Masters [NB: Fort was only a friend of Dreiser’s], reported evidence of grotesque monsters in almost every country in the world, and in almost every state in the union. Australia seemed to have a corner on sea serpents and their unlovely landlubber brethren. New Jersey leads the states of the union in anatomical horrors.
Fort reported the existence of monsters half-horse and half-turtle. He found evidence of a terrific creature which came up out of the sea and furnished a place for sailors to dance. He recounted the many legends of ‘Jersey devils’ and told of the ‘blonde beast of Patagonia.’”
Smith then went on to report the opinion of William K. Gregory, with the American Museum of Natural History. But before that, Smith gave Gregory’s credentials, filling an entire long paragraph with all of his bona fides. The story then ended with a single line from Gregory, itself one paragraph: “Barnum was right.”
By 1941, when “low Man” was published, Allen had come to view Fort as nothing but another screwball, and the Society as inscrutable. Gene Fowler did join—I do not know that Smith was aware of this—but the joining seems mostly to have been out of friendship with Thayer, and his involvement nil. Meanwhile, Evans was please with the skepticism that Smith evinced, pleased enough to put out the collected essays and pleased enough to sing his praises. In a letter, Evans tipped his hat to Smith’s “courage. I just can’t call to mind anywhere in the whole twelve or thirteen volumes a single place where you’ve pandered to vulgar prejudices, where you have pulled a single punch or said a single thing in order to avoid offending some moron.”
By Smith’s reckoning, Fort and his acolytes were just such morons. Their skepticism—unlike his, which was rooted in common sense and appreciation for science—was indistinguishable from the Victorian superstitions that he had outgrown.
Smith came to adopt this trait, along with others from his father. He wrote in his autobiography, “The thought occurs to me that maybe I have another important heritage from my father, in addition to impatience and a double-ended nose. I hold myself to be among the fortunate few of the world who have not a single superstition.” He was a thoroughly modern man: H. L. Mencken, he of the debunking school and supercilious disdain for backwoods Christians, was a hero. Smith also shared his father’s befuddlement at the world, taste for alcohol and cussing. In Smith, these emerged as a fondness for practical jokes and bawdy humor. His “left nut,” he told H. L. Mencken, was the “one that is withered from constant grasping.”
Around 1929, Smith became a rewrite man for the United Press, and the family moved to New York. The 1930 census has them all renting a place in Queens. It had been a full few years, but Smith was young, only 23. His work with the United Press allowed him a chance to experiment and expand with this form of journalism, as he not just re-wrote other pieces but also put out article under his own name. Later in the 1930s he moved to the New York World-Telegram, where he continued developing his style. He was also shopping books and trying to break into the New Yorker, though he failed in the latter and it would be a while yet before he succeeded in the former.
At this point in his life, Smith was “book crazy,” catching up on the education he’d missed by dropping out of high school and forgoing college. He was a literary critic, reviewing books and interviewing authors. He also did stories on oddballs: a bow-tie inventor, radio quiz winners, the worlds smallest midget, and strippers. Several strippers. (Another famous quip, upon visiting a nudist camp and meeting a woman there: “She was barefoot up to her chin.”) Some characterized him as a humorist, but Smith was leery of the designation: “I’m NOT a humorist,” he reportedly said. “I’m a reporter, a reporter with a humorous slant. I am funny only in the sense that the world is funny.” But then he amended this declaration, after he’d heard a definition of humorist as someone who thought he was either better nor worse than the mass of humanity: “I am a humorist,” he wrote in the last line of his autobiography.
Later, he would explain, “There is a mistaken notion that I spend the major portion of my time searching out screwballs, that I am forever on the prowl for nuts. It is true that I search for some of them, but I would like to make note of the fact that such questing is not altogether necessary. I am constantly running into strange people, whether I like it or not. One of my friends suggests that it is Destiny, that bizarre personalities gravitate to me. I am inclined toward another theory. I believe that I am forever bumping into sacks because God made so many of ‘em.”
The persona that he crafted in his writing was a combination of plain-speaking, slightly naive—but unflustered and commonsensical—rural writer and Mencken-esque debunker. He was, in the view of an obituary write, “coolly skeptical”—though that coolly seems not quite right. Smith valorized Mencken, so much that he was too afraid to approach him in public, but did write to ask for an autograph. Smith, as far as I know, was never formally associated with any skeptical movement, but continued a particular tradition of skepticism, running through Josh Billings, Finley Peter Dunne, and Twain: of the Missouri “Show-Me” type. But whether or not he was associated with organized skepticism, he was part of the nexus, influenced by Mencken and, in turn, being favored by Bergen Evans.
Smith’s fortunes increased in the late 1930s. He wrote a commissioned biography of the industrialist Robert Gair, and a spoof of Hitler, “Mr Klein’s Kampf,” which seemed to suffer with the onset of actual war. Subsequently, though, he was approached by publishers interested in putting out something by him. He ended up with Doubleday, and in 1941 put out “Low Man on the Totem Pole,” a loose collection of essays, some previously published. It was a success—and is the probable source for the common phrase “low man on a totem pole.” The book sold 24,000 copies by November 1941, and almost a million-and-a-half by 1946. Mencken opted not to review it—as Smith had asked him to do—but praised it in a letter to him.
Based on this success, Smith left routine newspaper work and fashioned himself a writer. He did have a column for a little while starting in October 1941, but was unsatisfied with it and cut the contract short. Otherwise, he went on to put out numerous books—more than forty in all, essay collections; a novel (and sequels) about a cat that inherits a baseball team, which inspired a movie; baseball books; joke books; a fantasy novel; an autobiographical pastiche—and he wrote for a variety of magazines, from Coronet to Playboy.
In 1955, Evans edited a collection of Smith’s works, “The World, The Flesh, and H. Allen Smith.” He appeared on television occasionally. The Smiths lived in Mount Kisco, New York, until they moved to Texas in 1967, and he took an interest in making chili (which became the subject of another book). In the mid-1970s, he was working on a biography of Gene Fowler. The book would not come out until 1977, though; for while he was on the tour, Smith passed.
Harry Allen Smith died in his sleep on 24 February 1976. He was 68.
****************
Harry Allen Smith was ensconced in the small, modern literary clique of New York that valorized Fort—a group that overlapped with another contingent of modernist writers, chief among them H. L. Mencken, who did not. So it is no surprise that he came to hear of Fort and the Fortean Society, at the very moment of its founding.
In New York, Smith showcased his lack of superstition. He made fun of health faddists and poked at Aimee Sample McPherson. He and Joseph Dunninger—a magician who was at least familiar with Charles Fort and, later, the Fortean Society—attended seances, which Smith thought of as complete bunk, the point being to expose the hoaxing. Later, he admitted that there was one group he dismissed that ended up being correct: early advocates of rockets. He thought of rocketeers as “screwballs, no more than a small cut abovee tea-leaf readers and Ouia (Weejee) board addicts and Imminent-End-of-the-World prophets.” But by the time his autobiography was published, in 1962, they’d had the last laugh.
Also in New York, Smith rubbed elbows with literary lights. He got to know Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and Benjamin De Casseres, who was a friend of Charles Fort. He met Burton Rascoe at a party, but Rascoe blew him off—prompting Smith to tell him that he was president of the “Burton Rascoe Literary Club of Tulsa”—Rascoe was from Oklahoma—but now he was sorry he’d ever taken such a position. Rascoe followed him around the party trying to ingratiate himself. Known by such company, and a book reviewer, it is no surprise that Smith attended the first (and only!) meeting of the Fortean Society, in January 1931.
He later wrote about it for “Low Man on the Totem Pole”: it was chosen for inclusion in his best-of by Bergen Evans; and a version of the story made it into his autobiography. As Smith told it, Fort was the cause of his no longer fetishizing authors; after he attended the meeting—which was really publicity for “Lo!”—and met the man himself, forming an opinion of him along the lines of Mencken’s and Evans’s, Smith had to re-evaluate just how smart he thought authors really were. He turned his attention, instead, to writing about athletes and celebrities and strippers (though he still did book reviews for some years). The story in “Low Man” constituted all of chapter five.
The chapter gave some biographical background on Fort, and his ideas, which Smith said were borrowed from John Jacob Astor II’s “A Journey to Other Worlds.” He then went on to describe some of Fort’s ideas, and attributed them to strongly held belief—Fort “called attention, for example, to the simultaneous disappearance of Ambrose Bierce in Mexico and Ambrose Small in Canada. Was someone perhaps collecting Ambroses? He suspected as much—which doesn’t seem exactly right, as it missed Fort’s puckish sense of humor. (Smith himself admitted this a few sentences later, making Fort not a screwball, but a nihilist: “He believed in nothing.”)
That Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, John Cowper Powys, Tiffany Thayer, and Alexander Woollcott should celebrate such a man gave Smith pause. And then there was to be a society, dedicated to preserving Fort’s data—which, as Smith later learned, were nothing more than newspaper clippings and penciled notes, written in a code, that Fort had squirreled about his apartment in old shoe boxes. This was the man, these were the beliefs, that Dreiser had blackmailed Horace Liveright into publishing? This was the man who was “a sort of hobby horse with certain literary groups? [I am not sure to whom Smith refers here.] This man, who Smith noted—believed the stars were just apertures in a gelatinous substance that surrounded the earth, this man whom the public (rightly, it would seem) ignored, this man who said huge fields of ice and acres of caterpillars floated in a Super-Sargasso Sea that floated above our heads, this man whom Thayer wanted ranked with Galileo and Pasteur, this man who inspired Thayer’s ravings—this man made a mockery of the literary profession:
“After I had looked into the matter of Charles Fort’s great genius, then contemplated with men who trumpeted that genius, I had a change of heart about book authors.”
Smith, though, did salvage his heroes. Ben Hecht, he said, only praised Fort because “The Book of the Damned” had given him a story idea that saw him through a dry patch. “I’ve always had an affection for old man Fort since that day, Otherwise, I don’t know what he’s driving at,” Hecht supposedly said—which doesn’t quite fit with his later actions. But that night, Smith said, he appeared only for cocktails, then went to meet Gene Fowler—another Smith hero—at the wrestling matches. Meanwhile, Mencken wrote Smith to protest any association of his name with the Fortean Society: “Your story describing the funeral of Charles Fort lists me as one of his customers. This was a libel of a virulence sufficient to shock humanity. As a matter of fact, I looked upon Fort as a quack of the most obvious sort and often said so in print. As a Christian I forgive the man who wrote the story and news editor who passed it. But both will suffer in hell.”
And, indeed, Smith does seem to have taken a pose dyspeptic view of literary culture as the thirties wore on, as well as declaring himself on the side of Mencken and Evans as a skeptic who supported science and opposed Fort and the Fortean Society—seeing Forteans not as skeptical themselves, but credulous. Shortly after the Fortean Society meeting, he went to meet Fort—the meeting was at the end of January, and he met Fort in the middle of February. He wrote up a piece about him and his Supercheckers for the UP wires. When he reviewed Fort’s “Wild Talents” in June 1932, he admitted the book was “fairly entertaining reading, but somehow” he didn’t “seem inclined to classify Fort much above Ripley.”
Two years later, Fort had become the set-up for a joke in Smith’s writing. Covering the debut of the Loch Ness Monster, spent the bulk of the article on Fort: the reports, he said, “provide small excitement for one familiar with the records compiled by the late Charles Fort, sworn foe of dogmatic science.
“By Fortean standards, the Scot monster is nothing but a vestigial remnant of a once great species. The beastie that has been making the simple Scottish folk run for dear life is only a sissy sea-serpent.
“Fort, in one of his books, took up the question of sea serpents at great length. He was inclined to believe the monsters exist, but he always was puzzled by the fact that they are seen, perhaps once and then do a neat job of disappearing.
“Fort, who was a devoted friend of Thoedore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, J. David Stern, Booth Tarkington and Edgar Lee Masters [NB: Fort was only a friend of Dreiser’s], reported evidence of grotesque monsters in almost every country in the world, and in almost every state in the union. Australia seemed to have a corner on sea serpents and their unlovely landlubber brethren. New Jersey leads the states of the union in anatomical horrors.
Fort reported the existence of monsters half-horse and half-turtle. He found evidence of a terrific creature which came up out of the sea and furnished a place for sailors to dance. He recounted the many legends of ‘Jersey devils’ and told of the ‘blonde beast of Patagonia.’”
Smith then went on to report the opinion of William K. Gregory, with the American Museum of Natural History. But before that, Smith gave Gregory’s credentials, filling an entire long paragraph with all of his bona fides. The story then ended with a single line from Gregory, itself one paragraph: “Barnum was right.”
By 1941, when “low Man” was published, Allen had come to view Fort as nothing but another screwball, and the Society as inscrutable. Gene Fowler did join—I do not know that Smith was aware of this—but the joining seems mostly to have been out of friendship with Thayer, and his involvement nil. Meanwhile, Evans was please with the skepticism that Smith evinced, pleased enough to put out the collected essays and pleased enough to sing his praises. In a letter, Evans tipped his hat to Smith’s “courage. I just can’t call to mind anywhere in the whole twelve or thirteen volumes a single place where you’ve pandered to vulgar prejudices, where you have pulled a single punch or said a single thing in order to avoid offending some moron.”
By Smith’s reckoning, Fort and his acolytes were just such morons. Their skepticism—unlike his, which was rooted in common sense and appreciation for science—was indistinguishable from the Victorian superstitions that he had outgrown.
